Garry McCarthy Under the Gun
UNDER THE GUN: After a surprisingly chill NATO, Chicago’s police superintendent was the man of the hour. But the recent spate of violent weekends, and fear that the body count could continue to rise as summer marches on, threaten to tarnish the resumé of this one-time rising star
(page 2 of 4)
The police chief and the mayor after a violent Memorial Day weekend
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Other than his fondness for business suits, McCarthy, 53, is a cop straight from central casting: tough-guy attitude, stocky build, strong chin, thick neck, small mustache, heavy New York accent. All he ever wanted was to join the police force, and his arrival in Chicago is the latest stop on a meteoric rise that he never expected. “For the last seven years that my mom was alive [she died in 2004], she lived in an apartment downstairs from me,” McCarthy recalls. “So when I came home from work, I’d make a point to stop in. She always asked me, ‘Did you ever think you would go this far?’ And I always said, ‘No.’ ”
McCarthy grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Pelham Bay, a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx. His father, James, was a detective with the New York Police Department and a hero to Garry, his youngest son, who recalls that his father told him to “do better” and not follow in his footsteps. But McCarthy, who attended Catholic grammar and high schools and played football and baseball at the State University of New York at Albany, signed up for the NYPD in July 1981, two months after he graduated from college.
James McCarthy had a heart condition and died two years after his son joined the force. Inheriting his father’s police shield, McCarthy quickly distinguished himself as a beat cop. Other officers were soon talking about the young patrolman who had a knack for making arrests that mattered, busting people who were armed and dangerous. “They started saying that my initials didn’t stand for Garry McCarthy,” he recalls. “They stood for Gun Magnet.”
McCarthy made sergeant at the unusually young age of 26. He kept going, becoming a captain after only 11 years on the job. “At that point, I thought that was the end of my career because I wasn’t hooked up,” he says, referring to his lack of clout among law enforcement higher-ups. “And then, as fate would have it, Bill Bratton came along.”
Bratton had been the top cop in Boston, and his crime-fighting strategies as commissioner of the NYPD in the mid-1990s made him a legend in police circles. As McCarthy explains: “He kind of changed the way we did things so that they had less to do with seniority and more to do with achievement.”
McCarthy is referring to Bratton’s use of the CompStat system, which collects data about everything from curfew violations to murders and then spits out reports that show how each district is performing. These numbers allow the police chief to hold officers and their superiors accountable for results, or lack of them, mainly through frequent no-holds-barred meetings with the command staff. “I got to show my wares at CompStat,” says McCarthy, who earned his bosses’ attention by detailing his successes. “And, quite frankly, I did very well.”
He says that much of his policing philosophy grew out of Bratton’s approach, which worked so well that the city’s subsequent police chiefs rode it to historic drops in crime. Simply put, Bratton did three things: First, he implemented CompStat. Second, he acted on the “broken windows” theory; that is, he instructed cops to crack down on minor offenses—curfew violations, loud music, graffiti, public intoxication, and so on—because any bad deed could lead to more serious criminal behavior. Third, he collapsed the layers of bureaucracy, eliminating middle managers and emphasizing the job of the beat cop. “It has to do with accountability,” explains McCarthy. “If [officers] don’t have a beat, if they’re not accountable for anything, all they’re doing is going from job to job.”
Bratton’s three-part approach was so successful in New York—the murder rate was cut in half during his roughly two-year tenure—that it became a national model, adopted in cities across the country. McCarthy, who had a front-row seat, paid attention, rising up the chain of command after Bratton moved on.
By 2000, he was deputy commissioner of operations, presiding over the CompStat meetings and guiding crime strategy for the entire department. In 2005, New York saw its fewest number of murders, 539, in four decades.
The following year, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark and a rising star in his own right, took notice. He offered McCarthy the job of top cop and the opportunity to help transform his downtrodden city from a place of “fear and crime,” where the murder rate was six times that of New York City, into one of “possibility and hope.”
A Tale of Two Cities
During McCarthy’s successful tenure in Newark, the number of shooting victims mostly fell...
... and so did the number of homicides...
... but Chicago is not Newark. Here, McCarthy faces an entrenched gang population that eclipses Newark’s.
NOTES: Newark crime numbers rose slightly in 2010, the last full year of McCarthy’s tenure—a burst blamed, in part, on budget reductions and officer layoffs. Chicago gang member population calculated by averaging experts’ high and low estimates (70,000 and 125,000). SOURCES: New Jersey State Police, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Newark Star-Ledger, Cook County sheriff’s office, Chicago Police Department
—Whet Moser
The buzz surrounding McCarthy’s move was not unlike what happens in the sports world when a superstar coach agrees to lead a perennially losing team. “His entire professional career has stood for excellence,” Booker said in announcing the hire. The mayor then defended the choice after reporters dug up two alcohol-related incidents from McCarthy’s past: a 1983 off-hours quarrel in which he had gestured toward his gun and a 2005 arrest for angrily protesting a parking violation on behalf of one of his two daughters, now ages 23 and 25.
McCarthy promptly implemented the same crime-fighting strategy that had worked so well in New York. From 2006 to 2009, Newark saw a 12 percent drop in overall crime and a dramatic 40 percent drop in shootings (see sidebar on next page). Despite his successes, the headstrong chief clashed with police union leaders and city council members, who described their relationship with him as rocky. “We hope he does excellent in Chicago and never comes back here,” a police union vice president, Walter Melvin, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2011.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, Rahm Emanuel was making crime—and his selection of a new police chief—a central issue in his mayoral campaign. One thing was all but certain: If he won, he would ax Jody Weis, the police chief at the time. Weis, a former FBI agent, was the first outsider to lead the department in decades and had performed well under difficult circumstances. After a rocky start, he had kept crime in check, despite the grousing about his G-man background and some questionable administrative decisions. The latter made him a lightning rod for criticism and earned him a no-confidence vote from a faction of the police union.
Emanuel pledged to bring calm to the department by picking a cop’s cop, someone who shared his belief in getting back to beat patrolling and who could make the department more efficient in an era of cost cutting. He also promised to put 1,000 more officers on the streets, yanking some from out behind desks and hiring others.
Rahm found his guy, helped along by a glowing recommendation from Bill Bratton. McCarthy recalls that he and Emanuel “hit it off” at a meeting in April 2011. He was named Chicago’s police chief a little less than a month later, on May 2.
“From day one, we had a shared vision about how to do things,” says McCarthy, who, like the mayor, can be alternately gruff and charming in conversation. The new superintendent moved into an apartment near Millennium Park, where he has been living alone.
Just a few weeks on the job, Emanuel and McCarthy announced the first step in fulfilling the mayor’s campaign pledge: the dismantling of the city’s specialized police units, a process initiated by the interim police chief, Terry Hillard, and continued by McCarthy. The two units McCarthy reassigned, the Mobile Strike Force and the Targeted Response Unit, had been directed to bust up gangs, but Emanuel needed the extra manpower to keep his campaign promise. The 500 officers in those units were assigned beats in various districts. Their expertise hasn’t gone to waste, McCarthy argues; it has just been redirected.
The changes kept coming. In June 2011, he began applying the CompStat system. Then, in March, in what was billed as an effort to streamline the department and save $10 to $12 million, McCarthy announced a consolidation plan that reduced the city’s police districts from 25 to 22. He commissioned a citywide gang audit, or survey, to help officers better understand the ever-changing gang boundaries and affiliations. He introduced a new computer system that delivers gang intelligence to beat officers. And he initiated gang “call-ins”—basically, meetings between police and gang members, mostly those on parole, to try to scare them straight.
Finally, McCarthy touted a “wraparound” strategy designed to better connect residents in crime-ridden neighborhoods with social services, such as job placement, domestic violence counseling, camps for kids, and the like. “I have this big-picture idea about the next phase of community policing in this world,” he says. “I think I’ve got it. That’s what we’re implementing now.”
McCarthy is nothing if not confident.
* * *
Photograph: Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune
This article appears in the August 2012 issue of Chicago magazine.
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What has"fractured" the gangs is CHA's scattered site housing program. The high rise projects came down and now working class black families own taxpayer money is being used to ruin their historic communities by dumping unwanted trouble makers on their doorstep. The latest census data shows that anyone who can leave these neighborhoods is leaving. At this rate with the amount of CHA housing being located here the entire South Side will soon be one huge ghetto. We are told to get "pro-active" and help monitor our blocks, when we call 911 the parties and group hang-outs just get louder. The Chicago Housing Authority needs to get real with the known bad element that they are empowering and come up with a serious relocation plan. Maybe then the police will take their role seriously again.
PLEASE STOP WITH THE PC!!! Its not the fault of the police for crime and it's not the teachers' fault for students' lack of academic success. Yes they can both play their role but it is quite minor in contrast to the real causes. Most know what those causes are but it is politically incorrect to state those causes and the media just goes on and on and on and on with their nonsense misdirected finger pointing.
McCarthy may be good at what he does and his leadership may be as good as it gets. But, to solve this problem he has to know the functions and variables. Like the professor said, the cause in many cases is "desperation". And, that's a state of mind. Is McCarthy in any way capable of changing how they think about their very small world?
Excellent article, McCarthy will be the one to take the fall for the rise in violence, for reasons beyond his control. For the last few years our police force has been cut by attrition. Instead of Downsizing the dept. the city saw it fit to just not hire new officers, not even ones to cover the couple hundred we lose to retirement each year. Much like the corporate world the dept was encouraged to do more with less. This obviously only works until a point when the workload tips the scales and "the less" cannot keep up with the demand anymore. Unlike business though we don't lose profits or productivity, law enforcement counts the losses in victims and body counts. I think we can all agree that the tipping point has been reached. There are few ways back and all require honesty from the dept, city, and its citizens. First the dept must be brought back to its full strength, which will take years, and a city wide unit must be reinstated. The article itself proves this, you need a force of a few hundred officers that can be sent to an area for saturation to put own violent upticks on short notice, it is more effective than anyone gives it credit for. Next McCarthy must realize that his strategy isn't working, this isn't New York and it certainly isn't Newwark, the level of violence the people of Chicago are capable of is astounding. Chicago's gang culture is unique and a strategy must be formulated or each individual area. But most importantly people must be called out for what they do or do not do. You can have all the police in the old but if a neighborhood doesn't want to change it won't. We must admit that communities on the south and west sides have created two generations of children that have no regard for life, zero impulse control, and believe that violence is the first and best problem solving skill. Until these communities stand up and call themselves out nothing will change.
You cant really blame the Sup for crime but you can point a few fingers elsewhere. I am only speaking as a cop who use to LOVE the job and was always first to work and last to leave . I was excited to develop information in order to execute some search warrants and get some bad guys. Those days are long gone on the CPD. Too many of the workers have had their wings clipped. By this I mean they have been thwarted in their efforts of proactive policing. This has been done again and again to the working police. When complaints against working police get investigated it seems that ever since the SOS scandals, the punishment is far greater than the allegation. What will a drug or gang organiztion do when a certain officer or group of officers are hurting their business by arresting them and making a dent in their profits by doing so? They will find a way to get rid of those cops who are hurting their business. They will file false accusations, lawsuits,etc. The department's IAD and also IPRA drag their feet on investigations sometimes even four years to complete them. Then the cop gets sent to the Police Board , which needs much revision. How do people who are not present for the hearing get to decide the fate of a persons employment? How absurd and less than fair . Our CFD counterparts get an arbitrator who hears. sees body language, etc..We get a hearing officer who breaks the case down to the board once a month and at times there may be several cases to decide in a single meeting. Yes, the board gets copies of transcripts, video footage,etc.. But do they really take time to view and hear everything? Not liely since they all have 9-5 professions to tend to. So basically if the CITY wants to decrease the crime spree BACK YOUR GUYS/GALS in blue. Not saying that we need rogue police but we do need to realize that good police work operates in the GRAY not black and white. You have to be innovative and clever and outsmart the street criminals and then turn them against each other in order to gather more intelligence and continue the proactive policing.
and the Sup will say-----Let's look at the charts and graphs again...blah blah blah NY and Newark. This guy comes into town and doesnt want to talk to the men and women in blue here and those that have served here ...he has NEW ideas, his ideas. He's going to save us. It near impossible to sit in the same room with his mans ego. Its not confidence, its arrogance and in my opinion ignorance. So busy taking all the air time to gets his kudo's on NATO. Everytime you turned on the TV there he was patting himself on the back. He and the city GOT LUCKY. THe protest fools werent organized enough. But he couldnt leave it at that....people starting laughing "there he is again he loves that camera." When in reality, it was just smoke and mirrors to distract from what was really going on in the city. Cops are not spending wayyyyy too much time filling out forms for his charts and graphs rather than on the street doing the job. Eventually he says its going to work....hang in there...Eventually???? If not by this year, maybe next? But one thing we can count on....he will be on TV to do an interview about it...and tell us again how it all started with the PILGRIMS.
What is really new this year are the wilding incidents in formerly safe neighborhoods: groups attacking one or two people in the Gold Coast, Streeterville, Loop, East Lakeview etc., tourists, women and children, etc. Apparently two out of towners like Emanuel and McCarthy don't get that job 1 is to keep safe neighborhoods safe. Not new but more disgusting is the shooting of children. Cut the tourism budget and hire more cops, bring back the strike forces or it won't be only McCarthy who loses his job. This is Emanuel's snowstorm on 79 moment.
Noah...THANKS for TELLING THE TRUTH about what really is going on in CHICAGO.
We need the MEDIA everywhere to tell our sad story. Neighborhood people for DECADES have been asking for help in neighborhoods that NEVER COMES. After decades 1.2 mil have left and we are about 1/3 smaller than say 35 years ago.
We need HELP from OUTSIDERS because locally we are not able to SOLVE OUR OWN PROBLEMS.
The MEDIA is doing a great job in starting to air the TRUTH on the streets instead of relying exclusively on interviews from politicians, nfps, unions or others who have a vested interest in defending their positions and saying what a "great job" they are doing and how we in the neighborhoods have "perceptual errors" and don't do our fair share to help. All of that is bahooey.
All of that rhetoric is put in place so BILLIONS can be spent for decade after decade after decade...maybe this is no 4 decades.
Thank you for this piece...and getting the word out how desperate we are for HELP. Anyone can be shot and killed on the streets of chicago at any moment of the day. That doesn't even seem to phase those who are in the positions to set policy.
They just set up more failed initiatives, do more grandstandings, and BILLIONS are wasted.
In my high crime district less than 1 person is arrested by a police officer per month...from data of a few months ago. PONDER THAT ONE...
Mike Flannery has done some nice work in the past few days
http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/story/18985688/open-air-drug-market
http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/18996215/another-west-side-neighborhood-asks-drug-crackdown
Scott Pelley is doing pieces although not focusing on reforms that are people friendly
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500164_162-51732.html
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2012/07/09/cbs-evening-news-with-scott-pelley-broadcasts-live-from-chicago-tonight-features-rham-emmanuel-interview/140840/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-D2b-w41gk
Huffington Post is also doing a great job.
THANKS NOAH...THANKS MIKEb...We need HELP. We need OUTSIDERS to help...
It is a fascinating, and relatively SIMPLE problem to solve...all of these inner city issues. The current players are TOTALLY UNABLE to FIX these problems for good.
This is sad and needs to be changed.
Mayor Emanuel's arrogance is catching up to him. He's been a failure on education and crime. It's his smug, self-satisfied, know it all attitude that makes him ignore people in communities who want to improve the city. Twenty one people were shot this past weekend in Chicago.
The StreetLightMarksman has his head up a$$
as TrueNewsUsa and SecondCityCop have pointed out again and again
did Skyline know their story of the 11-17-12 incident at oak street beach was "suppressed"? SlumTimes and the Trashbune didn't even mention it let alone the tv news
those groups are in cahoots with Mayor sweetlips and Mcbefuddled
the city is going from a dive to a graveyard spin and the mayor wants spend 55 million on a park
meanwhile CPD has to scurry around rotating officers through the districts because they are like 4000 shy of true force
more are retiring every month nobody getting hired
just ask the FOP they have to tell you
my advice if things don't change get a FOID card while you can
better to be judged by twelve,.. then carried by six
thank you